


Colors in the Stars

by phoenixyfriend



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, M/M, Multi, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Threesome - F/M/M, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 12:33:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: In which every world has a soulmark of its own, and Allura's finally understanding hers.





	Colors in the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for virvenotion on tumblr for the holiday gift exchange hosted by Voltron-SS!
> 
> Before you read it: I know I could have gone with the Blue Lion's deeper, greyer shade of blue. It's a lovely color. But Lance Is A Glitter Person And So Are His Colors.

Alteans had a tendency towards covering up as _much_ bodily skin as possible as _often_ as possible, and that was for a very good reason:

Nobody wanted to let their soulmate’s words be seen, not when someone could so easily take advantage of them.

Royalty, especially, hid theirs. The higher the standing, the more important it was to hide the words. A false soulmate had every opportunity for an assassination, after all, and for all that Alteans preferred peace, they were not ignorant.

The words found on one’s body were important in life, but not the first words one heard, as with the Galra, or the last, as with the Rygnirathi, like Gyrgan. They were not matching symbols, as with Blaytz’s Nalquodians, or the heterochromic shift that Trigel spoke of on the Dalterion Belt.

They were just... important.

And Allura couldn’t even _read_ hers.

“They’re most likely of another species,” her father had assured her, taking her hands in his and holding tight. “Maybe even of a planet we haven’t discovered yet, which would explain why the scholars don’t recognize it.”

“It’s...loopy,” Allura had said, frowning down at the words that travelled across her bicep in a blue that outright glittered. “Is it all one word?”

“Well,” Alfor had said, tapping at Allura’s calf, where the other set of words lay, in a red so deep that it could have been blood... or the color of Alfor’s own lion. “If they’re the same language as these, I’d say so.”

“That’s strange,” Allura had grumbled.

“It’s your soulmate, my dearest daughter,” Alfor had laughed, pulling her close in a hug against his side. “Strange or not, I expect you’ll find them much less strange in time.”

Allura hadn’t been so sure.

o.o.o.o.o

“Oh,” Allura said, a word so understated that she almost could have believed that the truth wasn’t staring her right in the face. “Ah, Pidge...”

“Yeah?” Pidge said, not looking up from her work.

“Your writing here, is that the human language?”

“Well...” Pidge dragged the word out. “It’s certainly _a_ human language.”

“How many do humans _have?”_ Allura asked, before she could stop herself and hide the interest.

“I dunno, a couple thousand?” Pidge estimated, squinting and tilting her head. She shrugged. “Most of the population speaks at least one of the top six or so, though.”

“Which are?” Allura prompted.

Pidge counted off on her fingers. “Mandarin Chinese, definitely. Spanish and English, obviously. Um... probably Hindi? Um... shit, uh, Arabic, I guess, though that one’s got so many dialects that I think people argue over whether it counts as one language. I don’t know beyond that. English is the one I’m writing and the one we speak to each other, though. Most of us on the team know at least one other, but English is the language of business and most politics, and the language of the country we all grew up and went to school in, so... yeah.”

Allura stared at her.

“...what?” Pidge asked.

Allura took another look at the symbols on Pidge’s papers, so foreign yet familiar, not identical but... close enough, yes. Pidge’s hand wasn’t the one to leave its words on her shoulder, but the similarity was undeniable.

“You are learning Altean, yes?” Allura asked.

“Yeah...” Pidge said, brow furrowing. “You’re not going to ask me to rewrite this all in Altean or something, right? Because that would be harsh, dude, even for you.”

“Even for _me?”_ Allura demanded, momentarily distracted.

“Hey, you can be kind of a taskmaster,” Pidge said, shrugging and not even pretending to be ashamed. “What do you want, then?”

“Teach me English,” Allura said, as steadily as she could. “If— _when_ we win this war, then you will be returning home. I would be a poor diplomat if I could not so much as read a sign when I came with you.”

Pidge gave her a considering look, suspicious and narrow, but shrugged. “Sure.”

Allura knew that Pidge was going to be paying closer attention than she could afford, but quite frankly, she didn’t care that much. She was going to learn this language, and read her lines, and figure out what was going on.

o.o.o.o.o

“How do soulmate marks work on Earth?” Allura asked Hunk one day, keeping her voice as light as possible. No need to draw attention to _why_ she was asking.

“Uh... it’s kinda weird compared to most of the species we’ve met,” Hunk admitted. “I mean, even the mermaids had something pretty set in stone, the singing thing? Reminded me of Happy Feet, actually...”

“So?” Allura prompted.

“Oh!” Hunk shook his head like it would bring him back to himself. “Right, yeah, sorry. It’s... a mixture of physical contact and high emotions, I guess? Like, if you just happen to brush hands on the day you meet each other, it’s not going to do anything. But like, after the... I forget how it’s supposed to be phrased, but after the connection solidifies or whatever, the first time skin-to-skin contact happens with heightened emotions in play leads to a pigment shift at the area of contact.”

“That...” Allura frowned. “That seems unnecessarily complex.”

Hunk shrugged. “You’re not wrong. It’s a hell of a problem for anyone who lives far away from someone they’ve made an emotional connection with on the internet or whatever. It’s even more complicated in cultures where full-body coverage is more common, due to the environment or culture, you know? But... it’s more of a confirmation than anything, I guess. Not a way to find each other, but a way to know you’ve already found them or whatever. You’ve suddenly got a splotch of red or grey or green or whatever, and it’s a sign that whatever you have is realer than anything you’ve felt so far or whatever.”

“I imagine there are people who go their entire lives without having those colors emerge,” Allura said quietly. “Are they happy as well?”

Hunk considered that for a long moment. “I don’t know. Sometimes, depending on how important they consider it, or how much hope they have. Um, what about Alteans?”

“Words,” Allura said. “Not first words soulmates say to each other, or last, but... important ones.”

“Doesn’t seem that different from our marks, then,” Hunk said, sitting down next to Allura and sliding her a glass of something warm and, when she took a sip, sweet. “Can I ask about yours?”

“...I would prefer that you didn’t,” Allura said, and let him draw his own conclusions from there.

o.o.o.o.o

“But what _is_ the loopy writing?” Allura asked one day as she tried to read the English on the screen, a file that Pidge had given her holding a children’s story with words simple enough to match her own level with the language. “I’ve seen none of its kind in my reading so far.”

“The loopy—oh! Cursive?” Shiro asked, and then hit a few buttons on his own pad. His Altean was improving more rapidly than Allura’s English, something that she tried not to let bother her overly much. Humans had short lives; of course they learned quickly.

(She’d find a way to help them live longer. If her soulmates were indeed human, and she was sure they were, she’d hate to outlive them by centuries. She’d help them along, and if that meant lengthening the lives of an entire species, then so be it.)

“Here,” Shiro said, leaning over and showing her the screen that let people scratch notes down as though writing by hand, rather than typing into a keyscreen. “So, uh, here’s the word ‘animal’ in regular written print, right? And _here_ , I’m writing it in cursive.”

Allura watched as his hand moved, comparing the two with a pout she could _feel_ forming on her face, even if she didn’t want it to. She could recognize the similarities, see where one reflected the other, but... “It’s so unnecessary. There are already so many writing systems for different languages. Why create more than one system for the _same one?”_

Shiro laughed. “Oh man, I probably shouldn’t explain Japanese to you then. Maybe start a bit smaller, like Pidge explaining how Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. There’s a name for it, I think...”

Allura stared at him.

“Synchronic digraphia! That’s it, I think. Allura? You’re looking a little still there...”

o.o.o.o.o

Allura knew before she ever stepped foot in the Black Lion that she would be rejected.

_“If I had to lose Blue to someone, I’m glad it was you.”_

Allura knew before Keith even went in that he would be accepted.

_“If I had to lose Blue to someone,”_

Allura knew Lance would need to leave his position and take over Red.

_“I’m glad it was you.”_

Because she had a role of her own to play, and when she came back, her confidence shaken and rebuilt, a battle still singing beneath her skin, Lance smiled at her and held out his bayard and said the words nobody else could have, _would have_ , said to her.

“If I had to lose Blue to someone, I’m glad it was you.”

(She didn’t acknowledge it, not yet. She wanted to—she _needed_ to hear the other words first.)

o.o.o.o.o

Allura sat at the edge of her control space in the Castle, curled in on herself with her helmet beside her.

She heard footsteps behind her, and it took only a moment to place the weight and cadence as Keith. She closed her eyes waiting for the inevitable criticism.

“Allura, you did the right thing.”

Eyes snapping open, Allura had to force herself not to turn around. The air in her lungs felt like ice, and the part of her that would normally be happy at confirming a soulmate was just... dreading everything.

 _Important words_ , she reminded herself. _Important moments. They need not be happy ones._

“You couldn’t let Hira get that ore,” Keith continued. Either he hadn’t noticed her slip or just... well, actually, she did have her back to him, still. Keith wasn’t the best at nonverbal cues most days, and not even seeing her face meant that of _course_ he wouldn’t notice. Most people wouldn’t, with the armor hiding her smaller muscle tension and so on.

“But now,” Allura managed to say, “Lotor has it.”

“You didn’t know,” he tried to assure her.

“That is the problem,” Allura insisted. “We never know. And that is exactly why my father sent the lions away so many years ago. To avoid this reality.”

Keith met her eyes, as they kept talking, and Allura knew that he didn’t have the information she had, the knowledge that their very beings were tied in a way they’d rarely find again. She’d tell him when she told Lance... eventually...

o.o.o.o.o

Eventually took much, much longer than Allura planned.

She was stressed, she reasoned to herself. She was busy. She didn’t know how they would react, when the evidence on her skin wasn’t reflected on theirs, and it wasn’t like she could just _manufacture_ the kind of emotional intensity that Hunk had spoken of. Besides, given how many battles they were all in every day, didn’t it only make sense for the moment of extreme emotion to be _particularly_ extreme? Heightened emotions were there in every battle, not just... not just...

Okay, so she was scared.

Sue her.

(Ha, Allura thought at the nebulous concept of judgement. It couldn’t sue her, as it was both a nebulous concept that was as such incapable of legal action, and there was no governing body whose rule Allura accepted in which a case could be taken to court!)

“Do they know?” Coran asked one day.

Allura frowned at him. “Know what?”

Coran sent a pointed look at Allura’s upper arm, and she curled in on herself as she realized what he meant. “I don’t... I mean...”

“You haven’t told them,” Coran said, as though confirming.

“Marks work differently for them,” Allura said quietly. “There’s no way for them to know yet.”

“So that’s your deadline?” Coran asked. “You’ll wait until they find out to tell them you already knew?”

“Yes.”

“They may not react well,” Coran warned her. “We don’t know how the humans handle such. You know some cultures look down on one soulmate hiding the connection from the other.”

“When it’s an option, yes,” Allura said. “I... I trust them, but I also fear how things will change once they know. I’m finally getting closer to them, more than just the princess, a distant leader.  Lance and I are having actual conversations now, and Keith is coming to me more often, sometimes even for things that do not relate to the mission. What if telling them changes that?”

“The universe marked you so you’d know your future,” Coran told her, “So that once you found the people who fit with you the way you needed, you’d know for sure that you had your greatest chance with them. It’s still only a chance, Allura, but it’s one that’s worth taking, is it not?”

Allura turned away from him. “We’ll see.”

o.o.o.o.o

There weren’t many chances to say something when Keith left to work with the Blade.

(Allura thought, perhaps, that if he were Altean, the words “The Marmora can go on without you. They have for thousands of years. Voltron cannot. _We_ cannot.” would be scrawled somewhere on his body in Allura’s own hand.)

o.o.o.o.o

Allura’s mind was a mangled mess of emotions after the battle of Naxzela. Relief and rage and a palpable tension from the fact that they were now bringing Lotor on board their ship swam through her head, and she had to clench her hands into fists to calm the shaking as she disembarked from the Blue Lion.

She entered the room to find Coran and Kolivan guarding Lotor, already in handcuffs, as Shiro and Matt and Keith argued closer to the door.

“—tried to kill yourself!”

“—already all going to die, it just made sense!” Keith argued. “I can’t pretend like—”

“—if Lotor had been even a _fraction_ of a second late—”

Allura shifted closer to Hunk, putting a hand on his shoulder to grab his attention. Behind her, the door slid open to admit Lance and Pidge. “What happened?”

Hunk looked down at her, biting his lip. “Keith apparently tried to crash his ship into Haggar’s to disable the Naxzela bomb before Lotor got there. He would have died if it had worked.”

There was a moment of frozen silence in Allura’s mind as she tried to work through that, the tension in her chest rising and rising until she was suddenly pushed to the side as Lance strode towards Keith with a single-minded intensity.

Lips met lips with what looked like crushing force, and Allura felt her heart leap into her throat (a turn of phrase she’d picked up from those books that Pidge had leant her so she could practice her English). When Lance pulled away from Keith, hands still fisted in the loose, dark fabric of the hood of Keith’s Marmora suit.

Lance pulled away, lips awash with red, just as Keith’s were now the sparkling blue of Allura’s words, and pressed his forehead to Keith’s. Their eyes didn’t leave each other’s as Lance spoke, the words quiet in the now-silent room. “Don’t you _ever_ do that again.”

Keith stayed silent and open-mouthed, and Allura was fairly certain neither of them had even noticed the pigment shift yet. It looked at least a little silly, since it spilled over the edges of their lips and onto the rest of their skin in some places, and didn’t quite cover all the pink in others, but the colors were striking nonetheless.

 _Now or never_ , she told herself, another phrase she’d seen in the human books, forcing her feet into movement before she could second-guess herself. If this didn’t work, she’d feel bad, but... with the rage and relief and affection (was it love already? Perhaps) that roiled through her body, she had to believe.

Allura pressed her lips to the arch of Lance’s cheekbone, and then Keith’s, not letting herself look until she’d done both. Her eyes got caught the smattering of bright pink on their skin, in the same shade and location as her own Altean markings, and then she pulled both of them into a hug that, judging by the wheezing, was a little much for the human body. Forcing herself to relax before she accidentally hurt one or both, she turned, and spoke directly into Keith’s ear. “I agree. You are not to do something like that, and if you dare to do so, I will be locking you into the Red Lion for good. I expect Red would have many an objection to you throwing yourself into harm’s way like that.”

She kept the hug going, not quite sure when to let go, and was then startled by the sound of the camera on Pidge’s phone.

(It was an artificial noise, one that Allura had no frame of reference for, but that Shiro assured her had been based on a noise that the mechanism for much older cameras had made when used.)

“Pidge, what the hell?” Lance demanded. “We were having a moment!”

“You’re going to want a mirror,” Pidge said, grinning. She wiggled her phone. “Or, if you aren’t carrying one the way I know a beauty queen like yourself normally does, I’m going to go ahead and just _show_ you what happened.”

“What?” Keith asked, even as Allura finally pulled away. Part of her growled in annoyance that she had, in her haste, not managed to place them evenly; Lance’s was higher and slightly more angled than Keith’s.

“Oooooooooooooooh shitake mushrooms,” Lance said, the words making zero sense to Allura, but the look on his face wide-eyed as he stared at Keith. It didn’t take long for Keith to adopt a similar expression as he caught sight of Lance. “She just—and you—we’ve got—”

“Soulmates,” Keith summarized, and then snapped his head to the side to look at Allura. “But you don’t—”

“Altean marks work differently,” she reminded him, something squirming in her stomach. “I... have known for some time, actually. I can show you the proof of it later.”

“Oh, it’s... oh,” Lance said, the red rising in his cheeks in a much more natural way than the colors now stamped into his skin. “The uniform?”

“As well as my other clothing, yes,” Allura said drily. “We Alteans cover the majority of our skin for a reason.”

The blush intensified.

A raw cough drew their attention, and Allura turned to see Lotor watching them with ill-disguised amusement and better-disguised impatience.

“As entertaining as the show is,” he said, and under the cultured tones, there was a weariness that Allura could hear. She wasn’t sure if the humans could, but the twist to Coran and Kolivan’s faces indicated that they could hear the way Lotor’s lungs and throat weren’t functioning properly. Whatever Lotor had been doing before this, it had left him in worse shape than anyone entering enemy territory, even as a turncoat, would want to be in. “I would appreciate the dinner that normally accompanies such, or someplace to rest before I inevitably hand over all the information you’d find useful. A drink, at least.”

Right, Allura told herself. Exhausted or not, soulmates or not, near death experience or not, there was work to be done.

(She’d have fun later.)

(Lance seemed like the type to enjoy kissing, and chances were good that Keith did too.)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one-shot, and will not be continued.
> 
> You can see where I feel into full "me" mode and just started slathering worldbuilding and cultural development everywhere.  
> Also... yeah, I'm ignoring the guidebooks and sticking to my "Serbian on her mom's side and German-English on her dad's" Pidge headcanon. Let me have this.


End file.
